


Screaming Into The Wind

by rufeepeach



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M, Season 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-10
Updated: 2015-11-10
Packaged: 2018-05-01 00:39:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5185571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rufeepeach/pseuds/rufeepeach
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Belle has nightmares from her time at the asylum; Rumpelstiltskin meets her on a late night walk.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Screaming Into The Wind

Rumpelstiltskin is a light sleeper.

Sleeping at all is difficult, although he’s found it easier these past weeks with Belle wrapped up in his arms. She tosses and turns, calls out in her sleep, and sometimes she even wakes entirely, shaking and crying. For this reason, Rumpelstiltskin is somewhat glad he sleeps so lightly: he always wakes easily to sit beside her, to hold her close, to talk her down until she can sleep again.

And then, as suddenly as she’d burst back into his life, Belle is gone again and Rumpelstiltskin finds himself once again sleepless. He worries for her, tossing and turning alone in that little bed in that little apartment over the library, without anyone there to hold her tight, to dry her tears, to make her a cup of warm milk and honey to send her back to sleep.

But she never says anything, and he thinks it too intimate to ask now. They’re supposed to be starting over, getting to know one another, and Belle has made it abundantly clear that she is an independent woman, and does not desire his help.

He longs to ask her, every day, how she sleeps, how the nightmares are. Whether they’ve worsened since that careless, callous wolf-girl chained her up in her library, her safe space, and she’d had to call him to come rescue her. Belle has been locked away for over thirty years against her will, and he knows how it haunts her, even when she is too proud and too determined to carry on to talk to him about it.

Rumpelstiltskin sleeps less, if at all, with Belle gone. He takes to taking midnight walks through town, trying to burn off the anxious excess energy that comes from worrying for her and planning for his expedition to find Bae.

He doesn’t walk by the library, of course: he might be a monster but he isn’t a stalker, and if Belle wanted him with her at night she’d ask.

Storybrooke is peaceful in the dark, silent, and as he meanders through the streets Rumpelstiltskin is struck by how little anything has tangibly changed. In the dark of the night Storybrooke could be any other little town in America, unremarkable and unburdened by magic and its accompanying dangers. No heroes, no villains, just people living their lives.

There’s a part of him that misses that quiet, drab little world they’d inhabited, before Emma had come to get the ball rolling again. Mr Gold had been a mean, cold bastard, but he’d slept fine every night, and he’d never worried for a thing.

The town is even quieter, and even beautiful, when the snow comes. For a week or two in the winter, everything is covered in a thick blanket of snow, and Rumpelstiltskin very much enjoys the crunch under his shoes on the floor as he walks, and the hush that falls over the land.

“Take that!” there’s a cry around the corner, and Rumpelstiltskin is jolted out of his musings. He realises he’s reached the street with the Mayor’s house on it, and even more surprisingly, that he knows the voice doing the shouting. “And that!”

He rounds the corner to Regina’s home, curious beyond belief, and is stunned to see Belle standing there, wrapped up in a coat and tights and thick boots, a scarf around her neck and her hair a mess of curls, her cheeks flushed from the cold. “Stupid witch!” she shouted, and threw another snowball at the Mayor’s house, hitting what he believed to be Regina’s bedroom window.

“She’s not home, you know,” Rumpelstiltskin addresses her, and Belle turns to look at him, balanced on the balls of her feet as if ready to fight, her breath coming in icy clouds from her lips. “If you’re hoping for a fight.”

“I know,” Belle tells him. “I just… I couldn’t sleep. I can  _never_  sleep and it’s all her fault.”

“I know,” he nods, warming the ground as he crosses to her so as not to slip. “I thought vengeance was a villain’s game?” he asks, his lips quirking with amusement. She’s so beautiful, flushed and a little wild, snowflakes stuck in her hair and on her eyelashes. Her deep blue scarf sets off her eyes to perfection, and he tucks it closer around her neck without thinking. 

“I hate her,” Belle admits, softly, as if it is a sin. “And I want to leave it alone, I want to be better than this, I am better than this. And I don’t regret sparing her, I promise I don’t, killing is always wrong and it wouldn’t have fixed anything but… but I just… I can’t sleep, I can’t _breathe_ , and it’s  _all her fault_.”

“Then what are we waiting for?” he smiles, encouragingly, and crouches himself, gathering his own snowball and hurling it at Regina’s front door. “That was for telling me you were dead,” he tells Belle, and then hurls another, larger, at the front room window, “And that was for thirty years without you.”

Belle stares at him for a second, and then a smile, a real smile, as beautiful as the dawn, blooms on her face. She hurls two more from her pile, and only one hits the house but it’s quantity, not quality, as far as they’re concerned. “That was for the claustrophobia!” she shouts, both angry and triumphant, and entirely beautiful. 

They keep throwing snowballs until their hands are numb and Regina’s house is coated in splattered snow. Rumpelstiltskin expects Belle to call it a night, until she turns to look at him, a question in her eyes, and her cold hand takes his.

“Could you… come back with me?” she asks, her voice suddenly small and hesitant, as if in his wildest dreams he’d consider saying no. “Please?”

Rumpelstiltskin reaches his free hand up to brush her curls back over her shoulder, and leans in to kiss the tip of her frozen nose. “Of course.” 


End file.
